Page 215 - Culture Technology Communication

198 Deborah Wheeler

asked. “Yes,” she said. “A guy. Don’t worry, I know he’s okay. I asked
my friends about him and they said he was worth meeting.” I was
surprised by her boldness, because of the hegemonies regarding gen-
der that had been at work upon the lives of many women I had met
in Kuwait. When we met this at the cafe, we found out that he was
in his twenties and was an electrical engineer who worked as a trou-
bleshooter for Kuwait Airlines. He joined us at a table, and so did the
cafe owner. The four of us sat and talked about how the Internet was
changing Kuwaiti society. Our conversation was perhaps symbolic of
the broader changes taking place in Kuwait. The computer brought
us together, the computer cafe provided the context, and new free-
doms of trans-gender interacting in cyberspace made us all comfort-
able sitting and conversing face–to–face.
Su’ad’s willingness to teach me how to use IRC challenges Nas-
sima’s observation that girls don’t teach others how to use the In-
ternet. Her willingness to help guide me through IRC’s special
linguistic codes reveal concretely how the education process works.
In return, I have also been asked by women in the labs at the uni-
versity to help them when they are just learning IRC. I’m not an ex-
pert, and often there is a male student who is sitting right next to
them. Local hegemonies do not enable them to ask males for help.
The more women who are comfortable with new communications
technologies, the more examples there are to follow, and the more
potential teachers there are who can help women get on-line.
While for some users, getting on-line in Kuwait means entering
a whole new world where men and women learn to interact with the
other in non-threatening and previously inadvisable ways—these in-
teractions continue to be conditioned by the local codes of a conser-
vative Islamic environment, symbolized by the Saudi man’s refusal
to even “chat” with Su’ad on IRC. The advent of the telephone, the
cell phone, the shopping mall, the automobile, all of these innova-
tions have not rendered benign the effects of conservative Islamic
culture on Kuwaiti lives. Observers should not expect the introduc-
tion of a tool like the Internet to do so either. Genders mingle on IRC
chat while men and women sit segregated in Internet cafes. To min-
gle in cyberspace is safe, to do so at the mall or on the street is not.
Thus in general, new technologies are adaptable to local environ-
ments, and usage conforms so as not to cause open and offensive vi-
olations of local cultural codes. In Kuwait (and other places such as
Singapore), an equilibrium exists in terms of Internet use between
“permitting room for creative expression and maintaining society’s
moral standards” (Low 1996, 12).